Luftwaffe Fighter Aces (16 page)

Spanish veteran Walter ‘Guile’ Oesau (123 victories) was the third pilot to reach 100 victories (on 26 October 1941). After a brief spell on the Eastern Front, he returned to the West to lead
JG 2,
then
JG 1
. He was shot down by Lightnings on 11 May 1944.

Haggard with fatigue, ‘Jochen’ Marseille looks at least ten years older than his 22 summers. He was a brilliant aircraft handler and his 158 victories were all against Western-flown machines, 151 of them in the desert. On 30 September 1942 the engine of his Bf 109G caught fire. Marseille baled out but his parachute failed to open. (Via Bruce Robertson).

Joachim Müncheberg (right) flew with
JG 26
and
JG 51
before becoming
Kommodore
of
JG 77
in Tunisia, where he was shot down and killed on 23 March 1943. Only 33 of his 135 victories were on the Eastern Front, and he was a major ace over Malta.

Helmut Lent commenced the war as a
Zerstörer
pilot with
I/ZG 76,
with whom he gained eight victories by day. He then turned to night fighting, claiming his first victim on 12 May 1941. A steady rather than spectacular scorer, he reached 100 on 15/16 June 1944. On 5 October of that year he was killed in a landing accident in daylight, his total 110.

Walther Dahl scored heavily on the Eastern Front before being transferred to home air defence as
Kommodore
of one of the new
Gefechtsverbände.
This view shows armour plating added to the roof of his cockpit canopy for added protection. Of his 128 victories, 77 came in the East, while, of the rest, 36 were American heavy bombers.

Pioneer night fighter Ludwig Becker returns from a sortie. He persevered with tight ground control, then later with airborne radar, and it was largely due to his efforts that the latter was accepted. His life was squandered in a daylight mission against the US ‘heavies’ on 26 February 1943, his score at night 46.

Heinz Knoke pioneered air-to-air bombing. His 44 victories were all against the West and included 19 heavy bombers. To evade escort fighters, the climbing spiral was his preferred manoeuvre. Late in 1944 he was badly injured when his car struck a mine. He never returned to combat.

The doyen of night fighters was Heinz-Wolfgang Schnaufer with 121 victories, who developed an uncanny
‘
feel
’
for the presence of the enemy. His usual method was to head for where the radar jamming was heaviest, there to search visually. Between 20 and 30 of his attacks were made with
Schräge Musik,
the remainder with forward-firing armament. Schnaufer survived the war, only to die in a car crash in July 1950.

The Führer, disrespectfully known to the
Jagdwaffe
in the later stages of the war as the
‘Gröfaz’ (Grösster Feldherr aller Zeiten—
Greatest Military Commander of All Time
)
, seen here with Goering, presents the Oak Leaves to the Knight’s Cross. Left to right: Alfred Grislawski (133 victories, 109 in the East); Emil ‘Bully’ Lang (173 victories, 148 in the East), shot down by Thunderbolts on 3 September 1944; Günther Schack (174 victories, all in the East); Otto Kittel (267 victories in the East), the fourth highest scorer but killed in combat with 11-2s on 14 February 1945; and Anton Hafner (204 victories, 20 in the West), who hit a tree during combat with a Yak-9 on 17 October 1944. (Via Bruce Robertson).

Heinrich,
Prinz
zu Sayn-Wittgenstein was one of the great characters of the
Nachtjagdflieger.
Starting the war as a bomber pilot, he transferred to night fighters in August 1941. His first 29 victories were in the East. Later in the war he developed strong anti-Nazi feelings but fought compulsively on to defend his country. His score at 83, he was shot down by a Mosquito on 21 January 1944.